Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
It sounds like access to downtown might be the issue, which means there should be plentiful capacity once one is downtown for surface reservations. Unless I misunderstood... Calgary, which seems to be a bigger downtown than Austin, does fine with just a surface reservation .
It looks like Austin has a very N-S orientation. Do many people commute past downtown in either direction? If so that might help justify a subway through downtown. Otherwise, unless the rest of the network is going to be grade separated, Austin would probably be better off making sure the LRT network is expansive enough to be useful rather than grade separating downtown to appease motorists or be slightly faster through downtown. The issue of course is that the LRT would have to have signal priority at intersections to not be super slow in a surface reservation, which would piss off motorists.
|
Great point. If your destination is downtown, so what if it is marginally slower than if there were a tunnel?
Don't get me wrong, I hope Austin gets the damn tunnel lol